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Update (08/09): OpenCritic's founder/creator/CEO posts his reason for selling the site on ResetERA


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I don't necessarily read reviews I usually check the Wade update with OC info check the score and read through the highlights looking for common themes and I know myself well enough by now to know what things I like and don't like in a game. For the most part if the reviews say the game is a broken wreck or just mid they are usually mostly right. Though of course, there can be some hidden gems and a game is just getting a bad shake so thats where reading the review highlights come in for me. 

 

Sometimes it's the games getting all the praise that really raise my eyebrows since some games are just destined to get sucked off by gaming media and you gotta see that it's not really all it's hyped up to be. 

  • Halal 2
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D1P start their own aggregate site challenge 

 

This just hit me deeply beyond being able to easily copy bbcode as it’s been how I check what is coming out since it was such a nice clean webpage, especially after meta turned to junk. That will be demolished now.

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I'm tempted to write an open source review aggregator, but writing html scrapers is probably one of the most boring and tedious programming tasks in the world and I cannot imagine doing it for every fucking review site and keeping it up to date.

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OpenCritic's founder/creator/CEO made this very thoughtful post on ResetERA explaining why he sold the site:

 

Quote

 

I was the founder, creator, and CEO of OpenCritic and thought I'd chime in here.

 

First, this is a big deal for me and my family. While I know that there's a lot of sensitivity about industry consolidation, I have to do what's right for my (now 3) kids.

 

With that in mind, I wouldn't have asked my team to approve the acquisition if I didn't have complete confidence that Valnet would be a fantastic steward for the site. I have seen what they're planning and I think it's exciting and could really work.

 

In my opinion, this acquisition should be a win-win-win for us, Valnet, and the gaming industry.

 

To be blunt, I had grown exhausted by OpenCritic. I woke up at midnight or 3am or 5am or whatever, 20x per year, to shepherd embargos for major titles. I've trained dozens of contractors over the years. And every new effort I've tried - podcasts, news coverage, guess-the-score, user reviews, etc - fell completely flat.

 

And I did all of that with zero compensation while trying to maintain an ambitious career in Silicon Valley product management.

 

At some point, I realized that nothing I was doing was making a difference anymore. OpenCritic was an established brand that just grew organically, and most of my efforts simply didn't matter. The reality of games media right now: this is a tough business. I saw some of my favorite publications just completely die (some, thankfully, reborn). We felt the industry-wide pressure and trends all the time.

 

I can appreciate what we accomplished as an initial team. We believed that the video game industry deserved a top-notch, gaming-focused aggregator. We narrowed on a brand opening that we could achieve organically with little investment (our lifetime investment was $31k). Things like crediting authors, giving scores context, being transparent, CMS access, Mighty Man, a commercial and free-tier API - these features mattered. Our early iterations mattered. And we executed well. API deals mattered. Over 10 years, we just kept growing steadily.

 

Over time, however, I started to hate OpenCritic because I felt so obligated to it, because I felt like we had something special, and because it had become just me, alone. And yet I could never figure out a way to grow its impact beyond a website that gamers check when a major embargo lifts.

 

It's extremely taxing to have something special that you really care about, and yet feeling like your efforts are worthless.

 

Kids dramatically changed the equation for OpenCritic. I just didn't have time to code or recruit anymore. As a result, I became frustrated by the question: "what's the long run for OpenCritic? How do I possibly make this work?"

 

How much longer do I negotiate with my spouse to skip morning parenting duties when the Zelda embargo drops when we've got a 5 year-old, 2 year-old, and 6-month old?

 

So that's where I was when we were approached for an acquisition earlier this year. We took Valnet specifically because we thought they had the credibility, experience, and serious focus to make OpenCritic reach that next level of success that always eluded us.

 

Valnet has been a breath of fresh air personally, because now, someone believes in OpenCritic and is putting real investment and expertise behind it, things we always aspired for but never had. And I believe Valnet has a product-focused vision that tries genuinely to serve the industry and consumers alike.

 

Anyways, I appreciate the support that this community gave us (all the way back on NeoGAF). I hope y'all will continue to share my optimism for OpenCritic's future.

 

 

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Update (08/09): OpenCritic's founder/creator/CEO posts his reason for selling the site on ResetERA

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